Felix Salmon

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JP Morgan is the first big bank to suffer a quarterly loss on account of multi-billion-dollar legal bills. It is also the most profitable bank in America (or was, up until this morning). Which means there are three possibilities here:

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It might have been the Slate redesign which pushed me over the edge, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just PTSD from Reuters Next. But at this point I will seriously donate a substantial amount of money to anybody who can build a browser plugin which automatically kills all persistent navbars, or “sticky navs”, as they’re also known.

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The Fed Whisperer, John Hilsenrath, had a great insidery article yesterday about forward guidance, and about the Fed’s ability — or lack thereof — to effectively signal its future actions. And it was timely, too, coming as it did a day before the official nomination of Janet Yellen as the new Fed chair.

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On Thursday I said that the US is not going to default on its bonded debt, even if the debt ceiling is reached: “with Jack Lew (or anybody else, really) as Treasury secretary, you can be sure that debt service payments would be priority number one”.

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Matt Levine had an excellent post last week on the bizarre market in credit default swaps on the USA — a market which people only ever look at during times of crisis or potential crisis. The nihilists are out in force today, using this market to confirm their priors, but the problem is that it’s very, very hard to look at US CDS, or to look at the yield on short-dated Treasury bills, and draw anything much in the way of meaningful conclusions.

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Did the FBI just deal a fatal blow to bitcoin? Zero Hedge is at his most apocalyptic this afternoon, saying that “the end may be nigh” for bitcoin now that Silk Road, the bitcoin-fueled drugs bazaar, has been closed down by the Feds. Even Adrian Chen, who has done most of the best reporting on Silk Road, was shocked by what the FBI found: